Book Released – Apache Maven 2: Effective Implementation

After being available in “RAW” (draft) form for the last few months, the final release of Apache Maven 2: Effective Implementation is now available online! It is available in both eBook and printed + eBook versions.

We had some specific goals in writing this that I think we’ve achieved:

It is intended to build on top of knowledge from the freebooks that have gone before it with minimal duplication – though still enough information to stand alone.

The book should be of most value to intermediate Maven users, but also useful to beginners. Everyone should learn something from it. It should update Maven 2.0 users on the latest available technology such as Maven 2.2, the newer Archetype creation from a project mechanism, and under-utilised plugins like the Enforcer or Shade plugins.

We wanted to focus on “best practices” and tying everything together in a way that shows how Maven was meant to be used. Hopefully readers will experience the occasional “aha!” moment.

The book works through the issues by a gradual example application, like building up (or applying Maven to) your own project. It intends to show how a reasonably complete project structure is best worked with, and the example application should be relatively interesting in its own right. It gets built from scratch, up to an assembly, building it in CI, deploying it to the repository, and releasing it.

We wanted to give some coverage to Archiva and Continuum (projects that we’ve both been involved in for some time) to illustrate team concepts, but also convey the concepts in a way that translates to other equivalent tools.

The book eventually weighed in at 450 pages – far more than we’d intended when we set out, though still with plenty of potential topics to cover. When we started this just over a year ago, my thoughts had initially been around simply covering the content from my series of Maven presentations and training content in book form, but soon found we could expand on many of the topics.

I had the good fortune to work with Deng Ching on the book (her announcement is on her blog), who poured a number of weekends and evenings into writing half of the content and reading (and re-reading) my writing.

We had some great help from our reviewers – Carsten Ziegler, Wendy Smoak and Emmanuel Venisse, as well as the encouragement of several others who wanted to help but couldn’t commit the time. Thank you all!

Book

Coverage of intermediate Apache Maven concepts with a focus on best practices and "tying it all together". Significant coverage of automated build and repository management concepts, illustrated using Apache Continuum and Apache Archiva.